Women In BRIC

You may be interested to know how women in business are doing in the emerging BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) countries—and be surprised how they are surpassing US women in some ways. This information recently aired on NPR’s Changing Lives of Women series, by Author Sylvia Ann Hewlett, who wrote Winning the War for Talent in Emerging Markets: Why Women Are the Solution. “In India, 11 percent of CEOs of the top companies are female,” economist Sylvia Ann Hewlett tells NPR’s Renee Montagne. “The figure here [US] is 3 percent. In Brazil, 12 percent of CEOs are female. It’s also a country with a female head of state. So we have to understand that in some ways, women in these emerging markets are pointing the way.”

Hewlett considers this partly due to being in a rapidly growing economy, with opportunities that come during the exciting time of economic transformation. But she also factors in advantages that some countries seem to have for women, such as childcare in India: here there are more extended families living together and inexpensive domestic help is readily available. This eliminates what their US counterparts may experience when they are “kicked off” their career track by taking the average 2.3 year break from work to raise young children. By disengaging from the workforce, Hewlett calculates that US women lose 18% of their lifetime earning potential permanently.

So while US women’s gains in education have outpaced men’s over the past 40 years—and more recently at the Master’s and Doctoral level—it’s important to note the statistics that compare college women’s ambitions. For instance, in Brazil, 80% of women in college say they are “shooting for a top job,” while in the US, it’s 36%.

Clearly, this report is good news for some and less-than-good for others—but it seems crucial to first gain understanding of these differences in order to seek solutions that will empower all women in our future.